Our staff

Our executive team dedicated to upholding the values of the Trust and realising its mission for the promotion of scholarship, innovation and research in town planning, urban development and land management.

Peter Phibbs

Trust Director

Peter Phibbs is a geographer, planner and social economist with extensive experience in program evaluation, financial analysis and cost benefit analysis. He has over twenty years’ experience undertaking housing research. Currently he is the Chair of Urban and Regional Planning and Policy at the University of Sydney and also Director of the Henry Halloran Trust at the same University.

His recent housing research has been on the development of the affordable housing sector in Australia and the impact of housing on a range of other well-being issues including health and educational outcomes. He is currently a member of the World Health Organisation’s working group which is preparing a set of guidelines on the connections between housing and health. He is also on the NSW Ministerial taskforce on Affordable Housing.

He is also undertaking research on the performance of planning systems and the relationship between planning systems and housing supply.

Kim Beecroft

Administrator and Assistant to the Director

Kim Beecroft is the Administrator for The Henry Halloran Trust, and Assistant to the Director. Kim has extensive experience in academic support, her current position is in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney.

Kim is responsible for the general administration of the Trust. Specific tasks include; managing the Trusts financial transactions, event planning and management, assisting in the development of an online presence for HHT and support of the Advisory board committee.

Michael Bounds

Project Manager of Research Grants

Professor Bounds is an Urban Sociologist and author of Urban Social Theory. His research over the past 10 years has concentrated on the study of the social impacts of urban development, with a particular focus on urban consolidation and gentrification. He also reviews for a number of academic publishers and urban, planning and sociological journals. Michael is the Trust's Project Manager of Research Grants and Co-ordinator of the Practitioner-in-Residence Program.

Ann Forsyth

Academic Advisor to the Trust

Professor Ann Forsyth, the Academic Advisor to the Trust, is the Director of the Urban Planning Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design . She is also a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.

She has won over fifty awards, citations, and fellowships for individual and collaborative professional and research work. These include national awards for professional and research projects from the American Planning Association (APA), American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) and the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA). Professor Forsyth’s research has been funded by such groups as the, National Institutes of Health, Federal Highway Administration, USDA Forest Service, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Lincoln Land Institute.

John Landis

Visiting Scholar

Prof. Landis is Crossways Professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches and conducts research in the areas of housing and urban development policy and practice. He is currently on sabbatical at the University of Sydney working on a book on "35 Global Planning Success Stories". Professor Landis holds a Bachelor's Degree from MIT and a PhD in City Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Rhode Island, Georgia Tech, and UC Berkeley.

Nikash Singh

Digital Designer

Nikash Singh → is the Trust's Digital Designer, taking care of all our web, print, video and photography needs in-house. He's enthusiastic about ensuring the Henry Halloran Trust is represented professionally and in line with its values. Which is something Nikash takes seriously, because when he's not completing his PhD in User Interface Design at the University, he's an active proponent of Design-for-Good and Open-Source Software. He has also been teaching Interaction and Visual Design to Masters and Undergraduate students for seven years at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning.